External tools connect to SaaS mode cloud data warehouse MaxCompute practice

This sharing will be explained from four aspects.

01 Entering the MaxCompute Ecosystem

02 Overview of Business Intelligence (BI) Analysis Tools

03 Introduction to JDBC

04 Practical demonstration - quick access to FineBI

Let’s start the first part of our sharing

1. Entering the MaxCompute Ecosystem

First, let's look at the external tools that MaxCompute products can support, which can be roughly divided into business intelligence, development management, transmission scheduling, and programming interfaces. This sharing mainly focuses on the business intelligence (BI) tool section. You can see that MaxCompute officially integrates Tableau, FineReport, FineBI, and Quick BI. Among them, Tableau, FineBI, and FineReport have built-in MaxCompute drivers in specific versions. If you need to connect to MaxCompute through JDBC, you still need to manually load the MaxCompute JDBC driver. Quick BI, as an Alibaba Cloud product, can be directly connected through the Alibaba Cloud account and AK information. At the same time, Yonghong Desktop in versions 8.6 and above can also connect to MaxCompute through the built-in driver. In the business intelligence part, there are also open source BI tools, Superset and Davinci can also connect to MaxCompute.

The development management part is what we will talk about in the second lecture, including DBeaver, DataGrip, and SQL Workbench/J.

At the same time, our products are also integrated with Kafka and Flink open source engines. Supported ETL open source tools include Kettle, Airflow, and Azkaban, which will be introduced in the third lecture of this season's live broadcast. Supported programming interfaces include Python, JDBC, and SQLAlchemy.

In addition to supporting external tools, MaxCompute itself also has an open ecosystem, including the built-in open source engine Spark, the migration tool MMA, the development ecosystem PyODPS and Mars, the tool ecosystem Web-Console, etc. At the same time, MaxCompute has also built a rich solution ecosystem and data application ecosystem together with Alibaba Cloud's internal products.

2. Overview of Business Intelligence (BI) Analysis Tools

Business intelligence (BI) tools support data visualization through dashboards, charts, and other graphical outputs of data obtained by the calculation engine, presenting it to decision makers in an intuitive form, helping executives and managers make more informed business decisions.

The BI tools shown on this page have been tested by MaxCompute team members and can successfully connect to MaxCompute table data and perform data visualization. This article focuses on commercial BI tools, among which Tableau, FineBI, and FineReport all need to connect to MaxCompute through the MaxCompute JDBC driver. Quick BI and Yonghong Desktop can connect to MaxCompute through the product's built-in driver. After these BI tools successfully connect to the MaxCompute data source, they can perform related operations such as listing databases, listing tables, viewing table structures, querying table data, and querying views to create data reports.

3. Introduction to JDBC

JDBC

JDBC (Java DataBase Connectivity) is a Java API for executing SQL statements. It can provide unified access to multiple relational databases. It consists of a set of classes and interfaces written in Java. Simply put, it uses Java to send SQL statements to the database to operate the database.

MaxCompute JDBC Driver

The MaxCompute JDBC driver is a JDBC interface provided by MaxCompute that can access MaxCompute. You can use the standard JDBC interface to perform distributed computing queries on massive data based on MaxCompute. The MaxCompute JDBC driver can also be used to connect MaxCompute and tools that support JDBC.

MaxCompute related basic parameter information

URL: jdbc:odps:<MaxCompute_endpoint>?project=<MaxCompute_project_name>
<MaxCompute_endpoint>: Required. The endpoint of the region to which the MaxCompute project belongs.
<MaxCompute_project_name>: Required. The name of the target MaxCompute project to be connected. This is the MaxCompute project name, not the workspace name.
User: AccessKey ID that has permission to access the specified project.
Password: AccessKey Secret corresponding to the AccessKey ID.

4. Practical demonstration - quick access to FineBI

Access to other commercial BI tools